News archive

The roughly 30 million original documents preserved in the ITS Archive provide information on the fates of the many victims of Nazi persecution, and form a unique memorial made of paper. To support the preservation of these valuable documents, Italy as 2015/2016 Chair of the International Commission has started an...

The theme of the 2014/2015 history competition of the German President was „Being different. Outsiders in history“. One of the entry requirements was to have either a family-related or a place-related connection to the chosen topic. I decided to write about handicapped/ill people who had lived in the period from...

On the eve of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 27 January, the Berlin historian Alina Bothe held a fact-filled lecture for some 70 guests on the so-called “Polenaktion” from October 1938. In this first mass deportation, 16,000 to 17,000 Jews of Polish nationality were forcibly transported out of the German...

For three years the U.S. American historian Prof. Dr. Rebecca Boehling headed the International Tracing Service (ITS) during its decisive restructuring phase towards becoming an internationally positioned Archive and Documentation Center on National Socialist persecution and the liberated survivors. At the invitation...

When the Gestapo arrested Helga Thörl, then a young woman from Hamburg, in April 1945 they stripped her of all her personal belongings, among them a wristwatch. In November 2015 the ITS was able to return this wristwatch to the now 91-year-old. For the first time in many years the ITS could personally return a stolen...

It’s April in Northern Germany, the spring air is cool, and the countryside has me mesmerised. I’m approaching the tail end of my 2015 European visit, a very important and emotional chapter of my journey.

In early November 2015 the International Tracing Service (ITS) sent out an updated version of its digitized archives to its seven partner institutions. With these copies of the documents from the ITS archives, the so-called “copyholders” of the ITS digital archive will have access to more of the unique documents of the...

On 18 August 1944, 21-year-old Rudy de Wijs was arrested in the Dutch city of Arnheim and deported to Neuengamme Concentration Camp, where he died only a few months later as a result of the inhuman conditions there. Among the personal belongings the young man was carrying with him when he was arrested was his notebook....

POLIN Museum’s Global Educational Outreach Program, supported by the William K. Bowes Jr Foundation and the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, is offering up to six doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships
for from three to five consecutive months in residence at POLIN Museum and the Jewish Historical...